Interview: Thomas Fitzsimmons

“Java is a popular programming language used both on the desktop and the net. Until recently users who wanted to use just free software have had to struggle with partial support for Java, but now that Sun have begun freeing their Java implementation the way has opened for free software developers to create an entirely free implementation. This free Java, IcedTea, was shipped by default with Fedora 8, and so we talked to Thomas Fitzsimmons, the lead developer behind this feature.”

The first few OpenJDK releases had a great deal of closed-source code (like, 50% or more). But recent versions of the OpenJDK have less than a megabyte of closed-source code (largely the security libraries), and the OpenJDK now builds using only open-source tools.

I wonder what the point of IcedTea is, when OpenJDK is now almost fully open, far more compatible with applications, and much faster (gcj doesn’t JIT, it can compile Java apps into fast assembly language, but for code loaded at runtime like applets, AFAIK it has to do slow interpretation).

OpenJDK still has some proprietary parts which means distributions that only include Free software such as Fedora and Debian will not include OpenJDK yet. Besides IcedTea provides a opportunity to look at what could be done to clean up the proprietary encumbrances still in OpenJDK and it already supports Java applets in x86_64 arch.

IcedTea is already included in Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva and so on so a lot of distributions obviously find it useful. Red Hat is also working with Sun to improve Free and open source java.

I think it is the best direction including IcedTea, because you can run into problems in licensing with closed source code trying to run against gpl code.

That is the way I understand it and the development of IcedTea will be non-stop such as any distro improvements will happen faster, bugs patched faster and overall end user implementation will help the community as a whole.

The whole point behind OpenSource is to have options not be locked into to Sun’s ‘only game in town with Java’ licensed from them.